LIVE BLOG: Where Are They Now? 2005 Awards Update

Up at the PM offices, we're still waiting for this year's Breakthrough Awards winners to arrive and sit down for a chat with The Popular Mechanics Show, our podcast that goes live with a video episode right here at approximately 4:00 p.m. EST. In the meantime, let's catch up with some of the top innovators from last year's inaugural awards to see how they're still setting the bar for technology…. –Matt Sullivan

THEN: The solar-powered aluminum and carbon-fiber robot was busy searching the Mars-like desert of Atacama in Chile, while Wettergreen and his team at the Cargnegie Mellon Robotics Institute were hoping for Zoë to hit 2 km per day in new test environments.

NOW: "We completed all of our major milestones," Wettergreen says, hitting 200 km of solo travel in the desert collecting over 200 observations at three different sites.

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Next: As Zoë continues to pump out the first biogeologic maps of the Atacama, new software currently in development should test her prowess at classifying rocks and making those maps more automatically.

THEN: Heeger, who won the 2000 Nobel Prize in chemistry, predicted his super-thin PV plastic would be mass produced for solar-powered tents, awnings and the like within two years.

NOW: With a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and $20 million in venture capital on hand, Heeger's company, Konarka, has found prime-time investment partners to license and manufacture its dye-cell technology.

NEXT: While Heeger takes on interdisciplinary research in photonic sensor technology at UC-Santa Barbara, his prediction for Konarka seems more than realistic given the company's recent deals.

THEN: Cyberkinetics' chip-to-computer system to empower the paralyzed was set for a second pilot trial in March, with FDA approval potentially five years away.

NOW: We started an overload of press coverage, but reports from the new trials with quadriplegia and Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) have been positive—a July cover story in the journal Nature reported that BrainGate had successfully transferred neural signals to a prosthetic hands and robotic arms.

NEXT: Earlier this month, the FDA approved one of Cyberkinetics' spinal cord devices, and with trials on a patient suffering from advanced ALS going well, the BrainGate might not be far off.

THEN: Using microbes to generate hydrogen while cleaning wastewater, the BioElectrochemically Assisted Microbial Reactor was available, but it didn't have any takers as of a year ago.

NOW: BEAMR's big break toward renewable energy is based on the ability of bacteria to transfer electrons to a surface. Logan's team has learned a lot more about how the microbes do just that as they've increased the process' electrical output. "We're well over double the power we had last year," says Logan, a Penn State professor of environmental engineering.

NEXT: Currently in negotiations for development and licensing with three large companies, Logan is hoping to ink a BEAMR deal by January.